Page 15 of The Dolce Vita Divas
‘So?’ she said, tilting her head to one side.
‘A bit of a crush I suppose,’ I admitted. ‘Well, yes, a full-blown crush. He was absolutely gorgeous back then, but he had Ellen. I never got a look in.’
‘I expect he will be bad-tempered and sloppy now,’ Juliette said reassuringly. ‘He’ll have food stains down the front of his jumper and terrible shoes that he never polishes, and you’ll wonder what you ever saw in him.’
‘I hope you are right,’ I said, but somehow I knew it wouldn’t be like that. It couldn’t be, could it?
‘You must send me pictures,’ Juliette said, ‘so I can see what all the fuss was about. Now then, I must go and rustle up something for Matthew’s lunch, but before I do, I’d better use your facilities. My mother used to call it a try and see wee, but these days it’s one for the road.’
* * *
On the fourth of October we left Heathrow and flew to Naples, landing just after two o’clock in the afternoon. When we got there, Susie had arranged a taxi to take us to the Molo Beverello ferry port where we and all our luggage boarded for the hydrofoil trip to Capri.
We sat together, me by the window peering out through the salt fogged glass, and she hugged my arm with excitement as the boat left the harbour, past the cruise ships and out into open water.
‘Aren’t we lucky,’ she said, ‘to be here together, instead of having to be withother people, no names mentioned, who would be whingeing about whether the toilet would flush correctly or had I packed proper tea bags.’
I thought back to the first time Greg and I had tried having a holiday together after our children had left home, and he had done exactly that. We’d only gone to Normandy, but to him everything was dangerous or somehow substandard, and above all,foreign.
After three days we had been thoroughly irritated with each other and I couldn’t wait to get home again, which was such a shame because I’d enjoyed everything apart from his company. He probably felt the same way about me if I was honest.
Without the children there as a buffer between us, I began to realise that we probably didn’t like each other much any more. It had been a bit of a wakeup call for me as I watched him, his mouth turned down with dissatisfaction, prodding at the perfectly delicious risotto he had ordered.
It was such a lovely afternoon as our boat ploughed through the calm sea, the sky above the Mediterranean streaked with apricot clouds, and out of the haze above the water we could see the island of Capri coming tantalisingly closer.
Occasionally a speedboat whizzed past us, and a couple of times some bikini-clad girls waved at us. I wondered what they were planning to do with their holiday. Young, attractive and presumably wealthy with some equally eye-catching friends. How lovely. I wondered how they were feeling. Confident? Excited?
Why weren’t they at work? Perhaps this was their work, being influencers.
I wished someone would pay me to influence, although my knowledge gleaned over the years was of less exciting things than yachts and makeup. How to make a pound of mince feed five people. Seating nine people around a dining table built for six. Teaching a class of twenty-seven children to read. Dealing effectively with a furious toddler.
I decided if there was such a thing as reincarnation, I was going to come back as a glamorous redhead. I would be slender and six feet tall with marvellous legs, not five foot five with the suggestion of a varicose vein on one thigh and a tendency towards middle-age spread that was only kept in check with much effort.
And why was it that those days there were so many treats I had been denying myself as I got older? There were loads of things. Smoking – well, obviously that was sensible – doughnuts, cream, alcohol, sugar, fat.
Just as I was getting on in life and had more time to fill, the list of things I needed to avoid, that might have cheered me up and made my existence bearable, grew longer. If it carried on, I would be existing on a diet of kale and oily fish. So not only might I live longer, but it would jolly well feel like it too.
‘When we get off, Paulo has arranged transport to the hotel,’ Susie said. ‘At least I hope that’s what he said. My Italian isn’t nearly as good as it was. I don’t think he realised that. And he did talk very fast.’
‘I bet it will be fine,’ I said. ‘Better than fine. It will be brilliant.’
Would it?
It wouldn’t be long now, and I would see him again, and I felt odd and slightly queasy at the prospect.
After what Juliette had predicted, I wondered what he would look like, how the years had changed him. Would he be bald and portly with a couple of missing teeth? Would I really wonder what on earth I had ever seen in him? But then, how had the years changed me? Would we look at each other and both be horribly disappointed? And did that even matter?
I smoothed down my new dress, chosen for comfort during the journey. Blue with white polka dots. My birthday scarf tied at a jaunty angle around my throat. White sandals. My toenails painted a defiant red. The warm coat I had needed in England was rolled up and stuffed in my cabin bag.
The boat pulled into the Marina Grande port, which nestled on the coastline beneath towering cliffs above. It might have been nudging into low season but there were still a lot of people about. There were ice cream sellers, little cafés and wine bars, each more appealing than the last. There were stalls with the most luscious fruit displayed under canvas awnings, and warning signs.Non toccare– don’t touch.
We disembarked from the ferry and as promised, there was a man there, holding up a card with Susie’s name on it. He didn’t speak much, just a few encouraging nods and smiles, and he helped us with our cases to the parking area where we found a funny little taxi, part golf cart, part van, withHotel Massimopainted on the side, and behind it a small trailer for our luggage. Within a few minutes, and with much tooting of his horn, we were out on the road, passing boat repair yards and high stone walls and speeding away from the ferry up a steep, winding road.
As we went higher, the view beneath us widened out into a fabulous panorama of blue sky which met the blue sea in a misty line, scoured with the white wakes of several speedboats. Further out there were a few enormous yachts and a massive cruise ship heading towards Naples.
I felt a huge leap of excitement, to be there, doing something so completely different, and it was made all the better because Susie was there too. Part of the enjoyment of that sort of experience was having someone to share it with, after all. Maybe that was the best part of having fun – laughing about it with someone else.
But then underneath my excitement I was still aware of that terrible anticipation, which still churned away in my gut. People did this all the time, didn’t they? Meet up with someone who had once been important to them. And they coped with it; perhaps they even laughed about it.
